2017AnnualConference

Once again, pharma analytics representatives met at the PMSA Annual Conference to discuss current issues and trends in the industry. The 2017 conference, held in Orlando, Florida, attracted 258 attendees from pharma manufacturers and their vendor partners and consultants.

Best Podium Presentation
Each year, PMSA gives the Best Podium Presenter Award to the highest ranked presentation as selected by conference attendees. Attendees were asked to rank all podium presenters based on several criteria -- insightfullness and applicability of the presentation, ability of the speaker to engage with the audience, and extent to which expectations were met.

Srihari Jaganathan

Srihari Jaganathan's presentation "Utilizing Real World Data to Understand the Impact of Patient Support Programs on Adherence and Outcomes: A Case Study" was selected by attendees as the best overall podium presentation. Click here to view the abstract.

Best Poster Presentation
The winner of the 2017 PMSA Best Poster Presentation Award was "Redefining Trigger Design Based on Machine Learning Modeling", presented by Tim Hare and Ewa J. Kleczyk, PhD, Symphony Health Solutions. Click here to view the abstract.

Lifetime Achievement Award
The 2017 PMSA Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Kevin Kirby, Michael Allen Company, for his contributions to PMSA and the pharma analytics community. Kevin served as President of PMSA in 2004 and helped to usher in changes that continue to help the organization grow today.

Kevin Kirby is presented the LIfetime Achievement Award by PMSA President Karthik Chidambaram and Vice President Jin Tong

Monday, April 24, 2017

Dramatic changes in the capacity, size and distribution of technology has meant an unprecedented acceleration in the generation of electronic data in recent years. This includes traditional health data, but also nontraditional sources like smartphones, shopping data and more. While the commercial sector has taken the lead in applying this big data, it’s clear that it will also be applied to both the traditional healthcare system as well as to health promotion outside that system. Dr. Joel Selanikio, a technologist and practicing physician, leads the audience through the definitions and origins of big data through examples of big data in business, and finally to the first steps—and the larger promise—of big data in healthcare.

10:15 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.

General Session 1: The Novel Use of Graph Based Machine Learning to Assess Provider Suitability for Targeted Outreach
Arif Nathoo and Web Sun, Komodo Health

As we enter an era of increasing transparency on patient and physician level data, marketing scientists are granted incredible access to data that can be used to improve patient outcomes in meaningful ways.

In this presentation, we share a straightforward approach for leveraging multiple sources of publicly available data to identify pockets of unmet medical need through network analysis. Taking this one step further, we then propose applying well-understood machine learning classification techniques to identify HCPs within those pockets that may have the greatest impact on addressing patient need across academic and community settings.

We believe marketing science leaders sit at the precipice of change and offer the following goals for this presentation:

To share our belief that easy-to-access data sources can be productionalized to address practical questions on patient need;

demonstrate the use of machine learning for predictive modeling for physician identification that can outperform traditional methods (e.g., expensive primary research);

To make the case for data-driven, end-to-end systems that can be used to improve decision-making across a multitude of patient and physician-level signals.

The methods presented here represent a standardized approach that any team can take to model potential engagement opportunities.

In today’s world different physicians/specialties play key role in providing overall care to a patient. However, for a pharmaceutical company it is difficult to understand the exact role each of the physician is playing in the continuum of patient’s care and how those roles influence the overall treatment. It therefore becomes essential for a pharmaceutical company to establish and understand the networks of physicians and then track them over time to enhance messaging and promotional efforts and derive more value.

In this abstract we will showcase a solution that helps to identify the network of physicians and track the movement of the network with time.

The approach includes the following two pieces that work in tandem:

Build the Network: Who are the different physicians involved in providing care, what are their different roles (diagnosis, referring, treating/decision maker and maintainer), and how are they connected among each other?

Prioritize physicians based on volume, their roles and their connections (i.e.). Identify influential physicians and decision makers and connectivity to other physicians through network maps.

Map the Key opinion leaders (KOLs) onto the identified network to understand their sphere of influence.

Track the Network: How is the network evolving over time and how the physician valuation change?

Approach – Use patient level longitudinal data to track the physician role and network pattern over time for patients of interest. Assess the performance against each of the network point built earlier. Identify how referrals to particular influential physicians are changing and the new physicians that are becoming key stakeholders in patient’s care.

Rank each of the physician more comprehensively based on their true network connection, role, patient volume and influence.

To date, few studies have been conducted that link patient support program data to secondary claims data to
measure real-world outcomes. We developed an innovative approach to evaluate a patient support program by
linking multiple data sources including the IMS Pharmetrics Plus claims database to patients enrolled in a patient
support program to demonstrate real world benefits of the program. The ability to work across companies to link
program enrollees with secondary data is an important tool in helping to identify which programs are effective in
delivering value to patients. We found that adherence was better, and that total health care and hospitalization
costs were significantly lower in program participants.

Recent changes and pressures amid health care reform, industry consolidation and expanding regulations has transformed the life sciences landscape. As individual health care providers have merged into
Integrated Delivery Networks or IDNs and become a more significant sales target for pharma clients, there is an increasing need for data to help navigate today’s highly complex, layered web of IDN relationships.

In this session, we will examine the evolving health care landscape, the complex and layered nature of IDNs and the related challenges, questions and demands in navigating IDNs. In addition, we will explore solutions for success with IDNs by looking at a case study that helps determine which groups are associated with particular specialties, track coordination of care across HCPs, IDNs and ACOs, build targeting strategies based on account affiliations, provider, practitioner and group relationships.

Why Important: IDNs have forced life sciences organizations/pharma clients to shift from traditional rep-to-provider selling models to an account-based, B2B selling models that focus on value, relationships and influence. This new IDN selling model demands new data solutions to understand the hierarchy of relationships to successfully execute business strategies.

Supporting Use Cases: In this presentation, we will examine how a life sciences firm recently used provider profile, affiliation and relationship data and volume-based medical claims intelligence to identify thought leaders and peer-to-peer learning networks in their analysis of the type 2 diabetes market in the United States.

The use case will cover:

Understanding the IDN organizational structure of priority IDNs by looking at the size and structure of IDN network, the type and degree of influence/control and those with diabetes focus by leveraging strategic profiling elements and datasets.

Identification of individuals engaging in activities related to diabetes such as inpatient/outpatient access and formulary decision making, quality of care and outcomes research initiatives, physician metrics, cost control, and risk-sharing policy making, product reviews, contracting, and distribution oversight, along with diabetes protocols and guidelines development

Strategy development of programs, activities, and initiatives for diabetes chronic disease management

Organizations in all industries are striving to create an analytics-driven organization like Amazon or Google. Pharma is no different. Terms like “Big Data,” “data scientists”, “predictive analytics,” and “machine learning” are becoming commonplace, though much like other disruptive innovations, there has been a healthy dose of hype.

Some pharma companies are starting to benefit from using new analytics techniques to drive business insights. A few examples include:

Leveraging RWE data to drive commercial and brand strategy

Leveraging digital information to segment HCPs based on content affinity

Using traditional data, social media and text analytics to build KOL influence maps

Building a suggestion engine to recommend the “next best action” for sales reps and digital

But most pharma companies have struggled to meet the aspiration. A recent Economist Intelligence Unit / ZS study found significant dissonance between the levels of investment in analytics and its impact on the business. Building a great analytics organization that drives how a company makes decisions is a multidimensional challenge.

Many factors have to converge to make this happen. In this presentation, we will discuss what it takes to construct a great analytics organization, and we will review an analytics maturity model that companies can use to gauge their own progress. The key dimensions of the maturity model are:

How do we develop and hire the skills and roles (data analyst, business analyst, advanced analytics, data scientist, etc.)? How should new skills such as data science and UX integrate with existing skills? What skills should be insourced vs. outsourced?

How can analytics organizations demonstrate value to the business?

How should analytics organizations balance innovation and ‘doing the work’? How do we develop an agile environment that encourages experimentation? How do not get caught up in “lab mode” and scale and operationalize innovations?

How do we drive change in our stakeholders to make them more comfortable with analytics-driven decisions and actions?

What is the optimal structure (role of centers of excellence vs. customer-facing, global vs. local organizations)?

How can analytics be treated as an asset?

How do we best leverage the new Big Data and visualization technology without feeling paralyzed by the vendor choices?

What is the role of offshoring?

This session will help the analytics professionals in the audience connect the dots between the challenges that they’re currently facing in their organizations and the strategy of building a world-class analytics organization and embedding it into commercial decisions.

Gone are the days of the simple physician-patient relationship. The rate of change is accelerating as the march towards value-based care collides with advancing technologies, computing power and connectivity. There are more market uncertainties, increasingly complicated relationships, and new, non-traditional players in healthcare data and delivery. Problems in this environment appear increasingly unsolvable as they are constantly changing in their dynamics. But the same forces driving the complexity and uncertainty are presenting novel solutions and breakthrough opportunities. Kevin will share experiences from exploring exponential technologies and organizations.

Our industry is changing faster than ever before. HCPs and patients are changing at the speed of the newest consumer technology innovations such as Google Glass and Apple iWatch. Policy and regulations are shifting. The healthcare ecosystem is consolidating, acquiring and divesting.

In this world, companies will be differentiated by their ability to innovate: to take advantage of the latest data sources, integrate them into the enterprise and drive meaningful insights.

However, many companies are impeded in their ability to innovate by several factors including:

While immunotherapy represents a promising advancement in oncology treatment, the advent of these therapies has also heightened challenges and prompted new business questions for pharmaceutical companies. Since 2014, three anti-PD-1/PD-L1 agents have launched with indications in multiple tumors, and many others are in late stage clinical trials. These immunotherapies work across tumors, potentially disrupting the current treatment paradigm of tumor-specific treatments. Given the growth of these new multi-indicated therapies, pharmaceutical companies are tasked with building more innovative forecasts to predict product usage as well as understanding how oncologist prescribing trends can inform immunotherapy adoption.

Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies have relied on analogs, primary market research and industry benchmarks to help address these questions. However, gaps exist in these data sources. Electronic health records (EHR) serve as an alternative approach to address these questions using real-world evidence of oncology patient-level EHR data. EHR data can provide objective insights into drug utilization trends in near real time. We will examine anti-PD-1/PD-L1 uptake and biomarker testing patterns in Melanoma and NSCLC to identify trends that may predict treatment patterns for a multi-indicated product launching in a new disease area. This research will be a joint collaboration between Flatiron Health and ZS Associates.

Over the past four years and for over 50 brands, Crossix has been the leading innovator in digital campaign measurement within the pharmaceutical industry. Our work has led the pharmaceutical industry to move away from flawed proxy metrics such as customer survey and website clicks to instead directly link digital media exposure to diagnosis and treatment-based clinical metrics:

Audience quality – percentage of those reached satisfying a diagnostic or treatment criteria

Intent to Treat – percentage of those reached who visit physician or pharmacy

Conversion – percentage of those reached who start treatment with the advertised brand or within a therapeutic sub-category

In this study, Crossix and Optum present a meta-analysis of 20 recent digital campaigns. These campaigns span a wide range of therapeutic categories, and form a mix of branded and unbranded campaigns. This analysis is performed at the campaign/publisher level and is focused on display and video advertising across both desktop and mobile devices.

After the meta-analysis, we will show the impact of enhanced real-world evidence clinical data on digital measurement, specifically; this data supplements mid-campaign audience quality to better predict end of campaign conversion, and it provides insights at key points along the patient journey.

Machine learning is a group of highly advanced predictive analytics methodologies which allow us tap into the full potential of the health claims data in order to gain insights into a particular market or therapeutic area. Unlike traditional methods of analytics used in the industry which takes a deductive approach through the use of business rules, machine learning takes an inductive approach to market exploration. Methodology: The health claims data is a rich data source however can perform poorly with categorical variables when derivative data structures are not leveraged in order to bring forward the key variables. Case Study: Using Machine Learning and health claims data allows to identify the diagnoses, procedures and prescriptions which are most predictive of a patient receiving a particular preventative therapy. Levering these insights to develop a model to score providers based on their propensity to treat patients in their practice which demonstrate characteristics that make them ideal treatment candidates. Conclusion: This Machine Learning Based Targeting provides valuable insights and a relative score of provide targeting value which allows for a better assignment of sale force resources verses the traditional deciling approach. This methodology is especially useful for targeting in rare disease spaces including oncology, immunology and rheumatology.

Undifferentiated messaging does not always address HCP’s information needs effectively. Nowadays, patients are more likely to seek information on their own than in the past. However, patient awareness does not always lead to symptom and treatment discussion with HCPs without effective HCP touch points with pharma representatives. A holistic approach, including impact analysis, predictive modeling, and DTC analysis can be combined to better address HCP and Patient information needs.

Impact analysis provides insights about the effectiveness of HCP touch points, and helps to optimize their frequency. Predictive Modeling output can be utilized to generate segments. Personalized messages can be designed for each HCP segment to ensure that HCPs receive tailored messages to address their information needs. A pilot can be designed and implemented to evaluate personalized messaging effectiveness.

Patients are more engaged in their healthcare decisions as they face increasing cost sharing responsibilities and are better informed of treatment options. Considerations for brand adoption go beyond clinical evidence to include patient preference and values. Therefore understanding “patients as consumers” aspect of the healthcare ecosystem presents new opportunities for pharma companies to enhance patient care quality and achieve brand’s commercial success.

Patient’s consumer attributes such as demographic/social economical characteristics and life style have been used to inform direct-to-consumer marketing and patient support programs. To further leverage these insights and formulate an integrated marketing and sales strategy, there is a pressing need to incorporate “patients as consumers” metrics in sales force effectiveness such as resource allocation, messaging and promotional offerings to increase adoption, trial and loyalty.

In this presentation, we will share a novel approach, with a case study, to introduce ‘patients as consumers’ dimension to sales force effectiveness and highlight its importance and value in impacting HCP’s prescribing behavior. It provides readily actionable recommendations for sales force resource planning and promotion tactic mix. Adding “patients as consumers” dimension, together with other HCP prescribing influencers, allows us a more comprehensive and robust approach to drive sales force effectiveness.

Social listening data can be a viable and valuable input to sales forecasting. We are trying the address the following questions:

Is it viable to include the social listening data in the sales forecasting equation? More specifically, what social listening data are we going to use and how do we perform quality assurance checks on it?

Is it valuable to include the social listening data in the sale forecasting equation? More specifically, would social listening data help predict the drug sales?

Can social listening data provide a new prospective? For instance, could pharmaceutical companies place more emphasis in the social media space to increase their drug sales?

Agent-based models (ABM) are classified as a class of computational methods for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents with the aim of measuring their effects on the system as a whole. ABMs use elements of game theory, complex systems, computational sociology, and evolutionary programming as well as Monte-Carlo methods are used to introduce randomness. ABMs are simulations that explicitly represent individual agents - humans, institutions, or organisms – along with their defining traits.

Simulation results emerge from the interactions among agents such as patients, physicians, sales representatives and managed care organizations. The results of the simulation can be used for a wide variety of analyses that may include forecasting prescription volumes and patients, understanding responsiveness to marketing and sales stimuli and simulating the impact of formulary wins/losses.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

8:15 a.m.- 9:00 a.m.

General Session 8: How to Turn a Potential Blockbuster Drug Into a Commercial Failure
Markus Hauser, PhD, and Russell Baris, Enginologi

Industrywide, despite often high aspirations, six out of ten product launches under-deliver against expectations. The low success rate is due to pharma/biotech’s inability to successfully adjust its go-to-market approach to the increasingly heterogeneous local health care markets. At Enginologi, we believe that this heterogeneity requires a more in-depth understanding of what drives launch success. It is not enough to ask whether a certain go-to-market approach is successfully driving a launch, but where and under what circumstances it is successful. Enginologi discusses real world (blinded) examples of how state-of-the-art analytics have helped better prepare for successful commercialization and, where necessary, turn around stalled launches.

The FDA is the gatekeeper for new product approval in the United States. The Agency has a long history of speeding the regulatory pathway for therapies that represent the first available treatments for a disease or have potential to materially improve the standard of care for serious conditions. This began in 1992 with the FDA Accelerated Approval Program, and in 1997, the FDA Modernization Act created a “fast track” designation. Ten years later, the 2007 FDA Amendments Act created “priority review.” Most recently, the FDA Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA) of 2012 created “breakthrough therapy” designation. This research evaluates the impact of the "special designations" on product performance.

With the growing presence of social platforms and with around 40% of the world online, the Pharmaceutical industry’s stakeholders' online presence is also growing. The Pharma has traditionally looked to historical marketing engagement activity and market research to understand customers. This growth of online presence and dialogue offers Pharmaceutical companies an opportunity to learn real-time about customer behavior, preferences, reactions, influencers, and markets. Insights from these online conversations is only amplified when this data is merged with structured data.

However, it is a challenge to find Pharma-relevant conversations among the millions of conversations present online and collecting data via social listening tools is only the beginning. Conversations need to be put in context to help extract insights.

In this presentation we will share how modern technologies, such as big data and natural language processing (NLP) can be used to help put raw, online conversations in context. We will also share what insights can be gleaned from contextualized conversations and how these conversations can be joined with traditional, structured data sets for more advanced analytical applications. For example, social data can be used to validate forecast assumptions and to better forecast clinical trial enrollments. Join us to learn about how to analyze social data and the opportunities made available from doing so.

This presentation will showcase the strategy and framework utilized for a successful Data Governance Program implementation at Janssen Commercial Excellence and the business value it generated – both in terms of financial ROI and process excellence. We believe that it will be of immense value for our industry peers to learn how the Data Governance framework can enable next generation Analytics and Insight Driven Commercial Excellence.